As a courtesy to e-mail recipients, e-mail senders often append a few lines of text to their messages, including “signature” information such as their name, company, phone numbers, and other pertinent contact information. As a convenience to e-mail senders, nearly all modern e-mail applications provide a feature that enables automatic inclusion of a pre-defined signature with a transmitted message. However, a shortcoming of existing systems is that after the signature is automatically inserted into the message, the user must manually modify the signature contents if they desire to send anything other than the complete pre-defined signature. Such manual modifications are inconvenient, and users are accordingly discouraged from making changes to their e-mail signature, even though e-mail signatures are rarely “one size fits all.”
For example, it may be desirable to have one version of an e-mail signature for external clients (e.g. not including company internal contact information), another version for co-workers (e.g. including the company internal contact information), and, perhaps, no signature at all for close friends and/or frequent contacts. Moreover, a sender may wish to customize their e-mail signature based on the context in which a specific message is being sent. For example, a user may wish to avoid sending their office phone number in a message sent while they are working remotely from the office, and wish instead to only include their cell phone number. Similarly, a sending user may prefer not to send their cell phone number in a message sent while they are in the office. People with multiple office locations may wish to modify their e-mail signature information based on which office they are sending a message from, e.g. so that the phone and/or fax number in the signature matches their current phone and fax machine. Thus it is apparent that the requirement of manually modifying e-mail signature information on a message by message basis can become a significant burden.
These problems with existing e-mail signature systems are exacerbated by the commonplace practice of replying with message history, which typically includes the signatures of everyone already participating in an e-mail thread, and perhaps multiplied for each additional reply from the same person. If a sender is courteous enough to manually delete the unnecessary signature copies, it becomes an annoyance and time sink to the sender. On the other hand, if the sender does not take the time to manually delete unnecessary signatures, recipients may be distracted and lose time sifting through excessive lines of text.
For the above reasons and others it would be desirable to have a more effective e-mail signature management system that does not require a sending user to manually edit e-mail signatures as needed for each individual message sent.